Last 9/11, I was in Montreal to explore religion and politics there. Forty years earlier, on the original 9/11, in Chile, a U.S.-backed military coup against the elected socialist government dealt a savage blow to left-wing politics. Some think the more famous 9/11 was timed to coincide with that one. Back then, it seemed clear that politics flowed from ideology, left or right. By the second 9/11, there was little ideological politics left; it was mostly about religion, a force that everyone, left and right, used to think would be left in the dust as History charged onward.

In Quebec, all attention was on the Charter of Secular Values, recently introduced to turn back what many saw as a religious tide flooding over public life. Who’d have thought the Marxist revolution would be a dead issue in the early 21st century (or dormant, like Monte Python’s parrot) while Muslim and Christian fundamentalism — or Buddhism or atheism — would be dynamic political forces?

Is this aggressive religious presence a regression to the bad old days and a retreat from modern secularism — a reversal of progress, as the “new atheists” warn? Or is it something else?

It’s refreshing to talk to Nader Hashemi about this because he rejects the normal models of relations between religion and politics. He’s a young(ish) Iranian-Canadian heading the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies. Growing up in Toronto after his family moved here from Tehran, he often grappled with what seemed like distorted versions of the realities he knew. “The relation between religion and politics,” he says, “is my lifework.”

He starts with a non-Muslim example: The Enlightenment of the 1700s looks like the height of rationalism and secularism — when the U.S. Founding Fathers separated church from state. But that Age of Reason was a continuation, he argues, of the Protestant Reformation, not just a reaction against it. How so? Well, Reformation leaders like Luther told Christians to read and interpret the Bible themselves, and not depend on explanations by priests. To do that, you have to think for yourself and, presto, you’re on the way to individualism, dissent, even atheism. Devotion to the Bible led (unintentionally) to freethinking anti-religion! In the U.S., wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “Americans combine notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds, it is impossible to make them conceive one without the other” — whatever The Founders had in mind.

Now think of the Muslim world today. Democracy there, Nader says, may eventually owe more to Islam than secularism. That’s because secularism “was imposed from above by colonial powers and then by post-colonial states that were corrupt, nepotistic, autocratic and antidemocratic.” Under Turkey’s military dictators, Shah-headed Iran or Mubarak’s Egypt, the repressors were the secularists. It was Islamists led by Iran’s Khomeini or Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who in effect demanded power to the people (along with many slips between cup and lip).

Besides, he says, actual separation between church and state doesn’t exist. In the E.U., every democracy with a Lutheran majority has an official, state-supported church. The U.K. has rigid laws against a Catholic monarch. Stats show church-state integration increasing. Yet none of that has stymied democratic advances. Religious groups have always been politically active. In Canada we probably wouldn’t have medicare without former United Church minister Tommy Douglas. Canadian democracy was negotiated with the Catholic Church in Quebec. It’s not so much that religion has returned to politics as that it never left.

This kind of creative, connective thinking — seeing religion as an ongoing useful political player — is one reason I am irritated by the new atheists, authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. They make a great clamour attacking religion over issues that don’t really exist, any more than the God they’re out to disprove. In fact, like almost everything in this area, their atheism isn’t as it seems. It’s not really about whether there’s a God — a monumentally abstract, boring question. They’re really writing about politics. Their work is a cover for their Islamophobia.

Take Harris’s The End of Faith. It adopts the detached tone of a neuroscientist, which Harris is, then suddenly erupts: “All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center” on 9/11 and had to decide whether to be incinerated by jet fuel or jump 1,000 feet to certain death. That isn’t criticism of religion; it’s the politics of fear.

“We need only ask ourselves why Muslim terrorists do what they do,” Harris writes. He says it’s because they believe they’ll “go straight to paradise.” But he doesn’t ask them. From bin Laden to the Boston Marathon bombers to Canadian cases, they say they do it to stop Western attacks on Muslims.

In the real world of politics, action begets action. Here’s Harris on the possession of nuclear weapons by Muslim nations: “The only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say this would be an unthinkable crime — as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day — but it may be the only course of action available to us given what Islamists believe.”

This isn’t about whether God exists; it’s all politics and imposing “our” will on “them.” It’s also a parody of the fanatical politicized religiosity he claims to despise. It gives me greater respect for Bertrand Russell, who wrote Why I Am Not a Christian in 1927, challenging dominant opinions in his own society — not “Why I Hate Islam” as a way to curry favour with a terrified post-9/11 majority.

You can start these books with sympathy for atheism and end up wanting to defend poor God even if, like me, you don’t think She exists. What they prove is that bad stuff and odious ideas can be produced without invoking religion or even (as in the call to nuke whole nations) in the chaste name of atheism.

Take that debate over Quebec’s secular charter. (Please.) Why doesn’t it ring quite true? Because this era doesn’t fit old categories: it’s neither religious nor secular. Catholicism is still statistically by far Quebec’s main faith, but it isn’t dominant as it was in the dark 1930s or even later.

Minorities then, like Jews or Jehovah’s Witnesses, really were at risk from the majority. Secularism — keeping religion out of public life — meant real protection. Now Quebec is the most secular, irreligious place in North America. It made a wild, total transition. So there’s no need to block religious dominance; this isn’t 18th-century France.

Sikhs, Muslims or Hassidic Jews don’t represent a force like Catholicism once was. Religions compete for attention alongside political parties, social movements, sports teams, neighbourhoods, your local pub or bistro — an array of players in what has been called post-secular society. Post-secular because the issue of secularism got settled: it won. The Charter of Secular Values debate is an example of living in a post-secular era but not quite knowing it. You keep fighting religious symptoms even though they’re not the dangers they once were.

Here’s an Ontario example in reverse direction. In 2003 a Muslim jurist proposed using Sharia law to mediate family issues like divorce. Ontario already recognized Jewish rabbinical courts and premier McGuinty seemed inclined to agree. Why? Saying no would probably require eliminating the existing Jewish right — and taking something away is always politically tougher than adding.

But resistance rose among religious Muslim women, led by Alia Hogben, a diminutive, unfailingly polite, scrupulously fair-minded social worker. “I don’t just speak from the Muslim point of view,” she says. “I try to see it in terms of equality, social justice, compassion . . . those are so embedded in Islam.”

Huh? Not Muslim but Muslim? They opposed Islam in the name of Islam. Is that a contradiction? Not unless you insist Islam is monolithic. But “there is no Muslim community,” says Hogben. Instead there’s a variety of voices speaking. This is sheer pluralism — a.k.a. post-secularism.

Sometimes the rights of religious people to be themselves deserve support — as in Quebec now. Other times, she opposes them. There is a role for religion in post-secular times, but as one set of voices among many. Those who “scare” her are those announcing what “God says.” But they, too, are among many. You balance claims, values, rights. If it works, no voice suppresses others.

“We were such a small group of idiot immigrant women,” she says — and looks like she wants to take that back, but I know what she means. They didn’t think they had the heft to prevail — till others supported them.

She represents the possibilities of religious voices in a post-secular age: no one dominates, weird alliances occur. Sometimes you lean toward religion, then you veer away. You can relax a bit about religion in politics since the world has changed.

During the French Revolution, the first Encyclopedist (pre-Wikipedia), Denis Diderot, said the last king should be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Would it were that simple now. Religion’s still around (while revolutionaries and old-style encyclopedias are hard to find). It won’t go anywhere soon, or ever, so why not take advantage of what it has to offer politically, within limits I’ll get to?

Mary Jo Leddy, the former nun who’s still a firm Catholic, lives and works at Romero House for refugees, in Toronto’s Junction. She deals mostly with Muslim men, mainly from different Somali tribes. It’s not easy; some refuse to shake her hand. She says she and her Catholic colleagues have “a policy of non-conversion. Many people had to flee because of it and were adamant: We’re Christians but we respect who you are.”

She lobbies politically, often with the immigration department. She says she knows people there who think they’re more infallible than the Pope. Who’d want to keep that kind of tart religiosity outside the public conversation? Or for that matter, the Pope himself, the new one Mary Jo has high hopes for. Take his recent musings on not judging gays and relaxing rules on celibacy. Is that just an idiosyncrasy? Or is it post-secular: a space where no one claims a monopoly on truth, including the Pope.

Fred Reed, whom I went to Montreal to see, converted to Islam a few years ago. A Muslim thinker he reveres, Said Nursi from Turkey, said that what must survive is belief itself, not a particular version. That’s highly post-secular. Nursi, who died in 1960, wrote during what Reed calls the darkest days of republican, secular Turkey.

We overlook Turkey’s former secularism — military, repressive, undemocratic — a more severe version than France or Quebec ever knew. It wasn’t anti-religion or anti-Islam — mosques were publicly funded — but Islam was excluded from public life. Islamic parties were illegal and there was a ban on head scarves in public service, schools, etc. Like Quebec now.

Fred says he thinks democracy and ethics can exist separately from the sphere of religion, but can also be related. “So call me a religious minimalist,” he says — another religious catchword for a post-secular age.

“The sphere of religion,” he says, “is profane-limited” — by the larger non-religious context that surrounds it. It’s not excluded or prohibited, but it has to work to find its own space. That isn’t something that could have been said of any pre-modern society.

Is there a handy definition of post-secular? How about an illustration: I know a teenager who’s half-Jewish, whose pals are having bar mitzvahs. They ask why he isn’t and he says, “I don’t think I want to be that Jewish.”

That’s exquisitely post-secular. He knows he contains different identities, which he didn’t choose, but none of which controls or defines him outside his will. He retains a margin of choice over which identities and what aspects of them he’ll embrace.

Others in the world haven’t had that room to manoeuvre in the past and many lack it now — it’s still a luxury to choose your identity versus having it imposed — but it’s the shape of post-secularism rising.

Mary Jo Leddy says the Somalis bring tribal and sectarian conflicts with them, but when they air them at Romero House, “They’re so happy to let them go.”

That’s the real argument for post-secular tolerance: not just that it’s right but that everyone feels better; you’re no longer stifled by the monolithic, exclusive nature of an identity that, back home, defined and determined who you were, totally outside your will; here, in the Canadian blender with no dominant force, other possibilities jostle with it. Slowly, everyone gains access to new resources and the freedom to try them.

If not a definition, what about rules — or, as Captain Jack Sparrow says, guidelines. Here’s one for religion’s post-secular role, with thanks to Alia Hogben: in political discussions, no one may quote God. Why? Because it cuts off debate and tries to restore the pre-post-secular status quo. It’s like Godwin’s law about Internet debates: whoever mentions Hitler first loses.

This poses a challenge to religious people: they must find ways to make their point without quoting God. It forces them to express themselves in ways accessible to unbelievers. Not everyone will agree, but it’s easier than banning believers from the political arena totally — which will just alienate and frustrate them while depriving others of the benefit of their insights.

Besides, religion isn’t going to go anywhere. It’s more likely that other components of the post-secular public square, like Marxism, Ayn Randism, atheism, humanism or even, God willing, neo-liberal economics, will depart first. The point isn’t that religion (in its many versions) has answers that others don’t, but it’s one resource among others.

That’s the nature of a post-secular world. If you don’t believe me, visit one of our public schools.

I suppose I should put my own cards on the table here. I’m not a person of faith, but I have respect and curiosity for the realm. I was a believer earlier in my life. In my teens, I learned from the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, majored in Jewish and Bible studies at university, spent a year in Jerusalem, then attended a rabbinical seminary and did grad studies in religion. Eventually, it fell away like a skin. How did that happen?

Nader Hashemi, whose life work is the relation between religion and politics, says anything that makes you think for yourself can take you where it didn’t mean to. The trick is to break out of thoughtways that had seemed inevitable, and to think independently.

I used my adolescent religiosity to learn that, to set myself apart from the religiously indifferent society of the 1950s that surrounded me, to practise a certain intellectual independence, and I think that’s why I still felt like myself when I drifted from faith. That core of thinking independently remained, though the content took other forms: politics, writing, etc.

Once I learned to do that, I felt less drawn to the experience of faith. It wasn’t so much that I lost mine — I had no crisis — it just fell away, like a skin I no longer needed. Skepticism, delight in contradiction, criticality seemed to replace it — not that those can’t exist in religious frameworks. For me, they just happen not to. I feel a bit like the kid who didn’t want to be that Jewish; I guess I didn’t want to be that religious. But I lost no respect for those who do. Now, in a post-secular time, I’m still intrigued by what we can offer each other.

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